The things that piss me off.

Translating software is hard, I know from my experience of starting two new open source projects (ISO Master and Asunder) about the challenges of learning how to use Gettext, finding volunteers to do the translations, encouraging and enabling them to translate my software.

The work was worth it for me, I now have almost 70 full translations of my software in 40 languages. But I’d like to make the process of getting your first translation easier, and generally help more software maintainers to get more translations with less effort.

The OSTD ( http://littlesvr.ca/ostd/ ) is an automatic translations system – it will take your .POT file and populate it with translations based on strings in other open source software, generating .PO files. Given that you can see which software the strings come from – this will be much more accurate than other automatic translation systems such as Google Translate.

I just started the project so there is a lot of polish still coming, and some significant features such as updating existing .PO files and a web service interface for other software to use. But it can be useful as it is already. Please try it out!

Any feature requests and bug reports are welcome. My goal is to make it as useful as possible to as many people as possible. I’m doing this part time, but I’m excited about the project and will do my best to improve it as quickly as possible.